When I was a kid, around thirteen or fourteen, I liked to pretend I was immortal. I was going through that phase where children begin turning their imaginations toward things other than make-believe play and I was starting to mourn the loss of schoolyard fantasies. Pretending to be Dragonball Z characters at recess was no longer appropriate. I mean, now we were interested in girls for Christ’s sake. We couldn’t let girls see us behaving like children.
So I kept the game’s going in my head and never told anyone. It was an epic tale just for me to enjoy and I swore that I would humor myself for the rest of my life by revisiting the story from time to time. I didn’t, of course, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
I lived a very long time ago, before known civilization had formed and homo sapiens had just discovered fire. I was born in a hidden, advanced society that was restricted to a tri-island area, in the middle of the ocean. These islands were the regions from the first three generations of Pokemon games. The twist being that the world of Pokemon was an advanced ancient civilization that was eventually obliterated by Darth Vader, who was the result of one of my friends being assimilated by a time-traveling Borg.
Yeah, I took pretty much every story I enjoyed and mashed them together into a Frankenstein fantasy telling of my existence. I discovered an elixir of immortality, shared it with all my friends, and went on crazy adventures. Some of these included being whisked away to the planet Nirn from The Elder Scrolls games, before discovering a Dwemer starship that facilitated my journey into space, discovering the land of Hyrule, and somehow ending up in Middle Earth, all before returning to earth just in time to see the first civilizations in Mesopotamia develop.
If you didn’t know, I also loved history. I still do.
One aspect of an immortal is that they would be well versed in many arts, skills, hobbies and cultures. So I built the habit of branching out my interests into as many different hobbies and niches that appealed to me. ‘Classical music is sometimes boring, but Gustav Mahler and Mozart are pretty great. Hey, so is this Grieg guy. It makes sense that an immortal would have as much of a soft spot for baroque composers as he would for Bob Dylan and Britney Spears.’ ‘Robinson Crusoe is actually really interesting, I thought it would be boring. I can say I read it the year it was published!’ ‘Hey, this Hikaru no Go manga is pretty good. I’ve been playing the game Go since it’s birth in China, of course. Oh…the only easy way for to me to play it is against strangers online. Holy crap, this is hard—okay…maybe I never went to Asia until the time of Perry then.’
Then I grew up and stopped playing pretend. But the habits I formed never went away. There were just too many hobbies that were rewarding and compelling to ignore them. Most genres of music were high art in their own right. TV Land was a treasure trove of media from years past that enabled a deeper understanding of the pop culture that predated me. And history always remained interesting.
Now I’m 35 and lamenting that even an optimistic prediction of fifty more years is still not enough time experience everything. Every month a new game comes out I want to play. There are thousands of books that are all deserving, perhaps even entitled, to my reading time. There are stories I want to write, instruments I yearn to practice, and skills that I would love to learn. But I simply won’t be able to. I have a son and daughter who need a daddy, a wife to love, and a job to grind at. Desiring experience has largely succeeded in making me frustrated at being unable to attain it.
Further, spreading myself thin from such a young age has enabled the old ‘jack of all trades, but master of none’ setting on my playthrough of life. I’m short on skills, aside from a decent understanding of technology and a weirdly specific knowledge of video codecs and VHS digitization. I can work IT, but programming languages have eluded me and never really had a penchant for math either.
I understand a lot of different things, enough that to laymen I might even appear knowledgeable. But I’m not actually good at nearly any of them. As a teen I thought that to have such a broad acquaintance with many different things could be only a positive with no negatives. And a surface level understanding perhaps is. But the pursuit of new hobby after new hobby never helped me focus in on one thing and make it mine.
But maybe that’s a lesson I can teach my children. No one human will usher in gestalt consciousness, as it’s impossible for them to absorb the vastness of the human experience before their time is up. The best way to achieve immortality is to become good at a thing, just one thing. And perhaps, if you have chosen your thing well, you can leave your mark on the world for the enjoyment of the generations that follow.
